"Abraham Lincoln, the man" : response of Hon. William Sulzer, of New York, to the above toast, at the banquet of the Lincoln Association, of Jersey City, New Jersey, Tuesday evening, February 12, 1907

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"ABRAHAM LI:N^C0LK— THE MA:N^."

RESPONSE

HOI. WILLIAM SULZER,

OF NEW YORK,

To the nljove toast, at the banquet of the

Lincoln Associnlioii, of Jersey City,

- New Jersey,

TUESDAY EVENING, FEBRUARY 12, 1907.

[Stenogniphically reported, and printed in
the Congressional Kecord by unanimous
consent of Congress, February 27, 1907.]

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Digitized by the Internet Archive

in 2010 with funding from

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http://www.archive.org/details/abrahamlincolnmaOOsulz

E E S P O X S E

OF

HON. WILLIAM SULZEE.

To the toast "Abraham Lincoln — the Man,'' at the banquet of the
Lincoln Association, of Jersey City, N. J. —

Mr. SULZER said :

Mr. President and Gentlemen : This is Liucoln's birthday,
and we are met to honor his memory.

It is a matter oi" much personal gratification for me to be
with you to-night. The hospitality of the Lincoln Association,
of Jersey City, in the grand old Commonwealth of New Jersey,
is famous from one end of the country to the other; and justly
so, because your association rises above creed and condition and
race and prejudice and stands for the toast assigned to me —
"Abraham Lincoln — the Man," and the eternal principles of
liberty, justice, and humanity, that must ever be dear to every
heart that believes in the greatness and the grandeur of our
first martyred President.

I am glad to see so many here to-night — so many distinguished
gentlemen, so many eloquent speakers, and I am glad to pay
my tribute to your association — the only Lincoln Association in
all the laud that has never failed, year in and year out, for
nearly half a century, to fittingly celebrate the anniversary of
the birth of Abraham Lincoln — and to say that you are to be
commended and congratulated for all you have done in the past,
for all you are doing now, and for all" you will continue to do
in the future to make the name of " Lincoln — the Man " shine
resplendent with the immortals of all time in all the centuries
yet to come.

ITis name, reaching down through the age of time,
Will still throueh the age of etei«!iity shine —
)viko a star, sailing on through the depths of the blue,
On whose brightness we gaze every evening anew.

Let me say, Mr. President, that Lincoln has ever been my ideal
of a man — a great man. I have been a believer in and an ad-
mirer of Abraham Lincoln ever since early boyhood days. I
have studied his speeches, read and reread his writings, wor-
shiped at his shrine, gloried in his career, and have always
been a close student of his wise and just and patriotic teach-
ings. He was, in my opinion, take him all in all, the most
heroic figure in all our history, and next to the Declaration of
Independence, he wrote the greatest political document in our
annals — the Emancipation Proclamation.

In the words of John Stuart Mill, "Abraham Lincoln was the
kind of a man Carlyle in his bett(>r days taught us to worship
as a hero." And as the years come and go he will be wor-
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RlilpocI move and more in every land and in every clime, from the
Occident to the Orient — throughout the world — hy the friends
of human liberty.

lie was one of the purest patriots, one of the wisest states-
2Xiei\ and one of the greatest men that ever lived, and that ever
will live in the world's history for all the years to come. He
loved liberty, believed in the people, and battled for the rights
of man. He was the friend of the masses and the champion of
the oppressed. He loved liberty and truth and justice. He
hated cant, despised hypocrisy, and denounced aristocracy. He
believed in civil and religious lilierty ; he advocated not only
the freedom of man, but the freedom of conscience, the free-
dom of speech, and the freedom of the press. He could not
tolerate class, or caste, or special privilege. He was the greatest
many-sided and myriad-minded man of his day. He had few
prejudices and no bigotry. All the prejudices he had were
against the evils of his time — against the pride, the assumption,
the arrogance, the special privilege, and the intoleration of his
fellowman. He knew the right, and he was great enough and
grand enough and brave enough to dare maintain it.

Abraham Lincoln stood for the freedom of man like the
Rock of Ages in a tempestuous sea. He never faltered, he never
lost hope, he never wavered, he never betrayed a cause or de-
serted a principle.

He searched for the truth, and, knowing the truth, he had the
courage and the manhood, without fear or favor, to promulgate
it to all the world. He was a man who stood immovable for
man. and he did as much for human liberty as any man who ever
lived.

In the retrospect — as the years come and go and the decades
pass away — this wonderful man, whose mind had a thousand
eyes and whose heart had a thousand thoughts, grows greater
and grander and moi'e glorious.

As the centuries come and go the immortal figure of Abraham
Lincoln will loom lai'ger and larger on the horizon of human
destiny — a great beacon light of eternal progress ever onward
and ever upward.

The history of his life, of his joys and sorrows, his hopes
and discouragements, from the little log cabin in Kentucky,
where he was born, to the Presidential chair, reads like a ro-
mance and could not haye occurred in any other country than
our own, where the humblest boy can rise step bj' step on the
political ladder to the White House. The story of the life and the
struggles of Lincoln, of his trials, his tribulations, and his tri-
umphs, is the bright star of hope for the poorest boy in all our
land and the inspiration of all America.

Lincoln was a deep thinker, a profound reasoner, a great law-
yer, and one of the greatest political philosophers that ever
lived ; and during his Presidential career, in the darkest hours
of our country's history, he was the guiding genius for the
Union.

He was a great statesman, enunciated great principles of Gov-
ernment, formulated great policies of State, held the Union
intact; and his policies and principles and example will live as
long as the Kei)ublic endures and ever be an inspiring incentive
to every patriot in all our land.
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Abraham Lincoln believecl in exact justice to all men. He was
the incarnation of democracy. He was no respecter of perf^ons.,
of conditions, or of power. He cared nothing for position and
less for wealth. He believed in and enunciated the great cardi-
nal principle of Jeiferson — ■" Equal rights to all ; special privi-
leges to none."

He was a great commoner ; he gloried in the Declaration of
Independence ; he believed in its principles, and he honored and
revered its immortal author. In speaking of Jefferson in ISGl,
Mr. Lincoln said :

All honor to .Tefferson ; to a man who, in the eoncroto pressure of a
struggle for national indopendence by a single people, bad the coolness,
forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary docu-
ment an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times and so to
embalm it there that to-day and in all coming days it shall be a rebuke
and a stumbling block to the harbingers of reappearing tyranpj' and
oppression !

In my opinion no higher tribute was ever paid to the author of
the Declaration of Independence. All honor to tlie memory' of
Jefferson ! All honor to the memory of Lincoln ! The two great '
American immortals.

When I was in the legislature of the State of New York, I
asked the late Senator Donald McNaughton, the representative
from Rochester, who knew Lincoln well, and who frequently met
him in the trying days of the civil war, " Who, in your opinion,
was the greatest politician and statesman that Americji has
ever produced?" and the wise old Scotch senator, without a
moment's hesitation, replied, " Lincoln." And then after a few
moments of quiet thought he said :

My young friend, if you want to become a real man and a great man
in the American Republic, stuHy and emulate the life of Abraham
Lincoln.

From his earliest youth to the sadness of his tragical dying
day Abraham Lincoln was always true to the promptings of his
heart, true to h'ls principles, and they were the principles of
hiumanity, the principles of liberty, and the principles of a free
gOA'ernment. He was always true to his political faith, true to
the fundamental teachings of the fathers of the Republic, true
to the men who were striving to do right. In one of his speeches
he said :

I am not bound to win, but I am bound to be true. I am not
bound to succeed, but I am bound to live up to what lia:ht I have. I
must stand with cvoryljody that stands right ; stand with him while
he is right, and part with him when he goes wrong.

What a noble sentiment !

Lincoln was a great lawyer. In his own way probably one of
the greatest lawyers that ever lived in America. He was a great
orator, and his simple speech at Gettysburg is one of the great
classics of America ; and his innumerable speeches, especially
bis wonderful debates with Douglas, conclusively prove that he
was one of our greatest orators.

He was a man of quaint humor, of much sorrow, of infinite
jest, of much common sense, and he searched and knew the
human heart. He had faith that right makes might, and in the
light of that faith he dared to the end to do his duty as he s-aw it.

He was a simple man — simple in his strength and in his
greatness. In moments of repo^se he was sad and reflective. His
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sympathy was with the poor and the lowly— with the sorrowing.
His great heart went out to those who struggle and fail. He
was always the same, yet ever different — like the waters of the
sea — but he remembered, as he said in his first speech, that he
was " humble Abraham Lincoln."

He was a great statesman, and no one to-day, reading his let-
ters and his state papers, can doubt for a moment that he was
the ablest and the most farseeing politician of his time, and the
greatest and grandest statesman this country has ever produced.

Lincoln stands alone in the illumined pages of American his-
tory—the greatest and the grandest and the most colossal figure
in all our annals.

No one will ever know the blood drops and the suffering of
Abraham Lincoln during the darkest and most trying days of
the civil war, the greatest war of modern times, when a million
men from the North and a million men from the South, with
their guns and drums, and their tramping to and fro, met in the
shock of battle, shook the earth, and the very pillars of our free
institutions. Thank God, father Abraham won, and we are
brothers again.

In this connection I want to tell a story, that perhaps has
never been printed before, regarding Mr. Lincoln's sadness and
greatness, and dry wit and inimitable humor, and in this com-
position there was much of all these elements. In the early
days of the war for the Union a great body of leading bankers
and financiers of New York called at the White House to see
Mr. Lincoln, and asked him to send ships and troops to New
York to, protect their treasures. Mr. Lincoln listened patiently
to all this committee had to say, and when they finished he
said, in his quiet, sad, and simple way :

Geutlemen, in answer to all you have said. I replv that I am doing
evei-ythins in my power with the forces at my com^mand to save the
Union. There is no danger to your treasures "in New York Citv. and
instead of askin.;? me to send war ships and troops to New York to
protect them, you should so hack home and lend -your money to the
Government and help save the Union.

The groat conmiittee of bankers and financiers returned to
New York wiser and more patriotic men from these few words of
the immortal martj'red President.

Lincoln loved the Union, and his first inaugural message
proves that his only desire was to save the Union from civil
strife and dissolution. He had said many times before that a
house divided against itself can not stand, and Lincoln was right.

When Doctor Long, an intimate friend of Lincoln, said to
him one day, " Well, Lincoln, that foolish speech will kill you—
Tvill defeat you for all oflice — for all time to come," referring to
the " house divided " speech, Mr. Lincoln replied :

If I had to draw a pen across and erase my whole life from existence,
and I had one poor Rift or choice left, as to what I should save from the
wreck, I should choose that speech, and leave it to the world unerased.

He was the friend of the toiler — of the producer — of the great
army of men who earn their bread in the sweat of their face.
In his message to Congress in December, ISGl, he said:

Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit
of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not lirst existed.
Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consid-
eration. No men living are more worthy to be trusted than those wlio
toil up from poverty — none less inclined to take or touch aught which
tliey li;ive not honestly earned.
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Lincoln died in the prime of bis life, at the summit of his
career, in the zenith of his fame, in the service ^t his country,
loved hy every friend of man, and mourned by all the world.

There is a reaper whose name is Death,

And with his sickle keen
He reaps the bearded grain at a hrcath.

And the flowers that grow hetween.

But the reaper can never rob humanity of the undying fame of
Abraham Lincoln. As my friend Col. Henry Watterson has most
truly and eloquently said :

A thousand years hence no story, no tragedy, no epic poem will lie
filled with greater wonder or be read with deeper feeling than that
which tells of his life and death.

Lincoln was indeed a man — the man — upon whose like we
shall not look again ; and take him all in all he was the friend
of man — the greatest apostle of human liberty the world has
ever seen.

The mortal Lincoln i^ no more. He sleeps beneath the marble
shaft at Springfield, and his shrine is. and ever will be, the
Mecca of the lilierty-Ioving people of the world whither shall
journey to the end of time the countless millions yet unborn to
kneel and kindle anew their patriotism and their zeal for
libertj'.

But Lincoln needs no monument of marble to perpetuate his
memory ; he will live forever in his v>-ork for man ; his words
will live in the hearts of the people of free America, and future
generations will arise to call him blessed as the patron saint of
their consecrated liberties.

President Lincoln vras perhaps more abused and caricatured
during the time he was in the White House than any other
man that ever lived in our country. And yet, when he was
stricken down by the cruel bullet of an irresponsible lunatic, all
the world bowed down and wept, and every Government on
earth paid homage to his great heart and sympathetic soul, to
his deeds and works and words and worth.

No paper in all the world abused Lincoln more than Punch of
London, and yet, upon the death of Lincoln, it wrote one of the
most beautiful tributes that ever was written to the memory of
man, and .James Russell Lowell, one of America's greatest poets,
summed it all up in a stanza in his Commemorative Ode v»'heu
he said of the undying fame of Lincoln :

Great captains, vrith their guns and drums, disturb our judgment for

the hour ;
But at last silence comes — these all are gone :
And standing like a tower our children's children shall behold the glory

of his fame.
This kindly, earnest, brave farseeing man —
Sagacious, patient, dreading praise, not blarao —
New birth of our new soil — the first American.
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